Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 50' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 25 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:15 (EDT) – 2 hours and 8 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 19° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:05.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.2, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h21m30s 4°23'S Aquarius -10.8 29'38"4
Jupiter 23h21m30s 5°14'S Aquarius -2.2 34"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
06:20
Sunset
20:53
Twilight ends
22:46
Twilight begins
04:26


Waning Gibbous

92%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:41 15:22 22:03
Venus 07:27 14:33 21:39
Moon 22:12 03:23 08:43
Mars 02:09 09:23 16:36
Jupiter 02:48 10:09 17:30
Saturn 23:05 04:47 10:28
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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